Legislation

An ACLU bill designed to protect privacy in the criminal justice system died this year.

This legislation generally prohibits employers from asking if applicants have been convicted of a crime at the initial application process, giving applicants a chance to be interviewed and an opportunity for employers to see an applicant’s qualifications and not solely their mistakes.

In some tension with its passage of “ban the box” legislation, the General Assembly this year continued its trend of pushing to impose criminal background checks on applicants for a number of employment and volunteer positions.

Under current RI law, DNA can only be collected from individuals convicted of certain felonies; the ACLU testified that collecting from individuals who have merely been arrested undermined the presumption of innocence and was a dangerous step towards the creation of a comprehensive DNA database.

This legislation would have allowed the state of Rhode Island to produce and sell marijuana for recreational consumption, and authorized the state to set specific and enforceable limits on access to marijuana and funneling money from its sale to substance abuse treatment programs.